Wednesday, January 2
feed discovery in firefox, redux
Bug #1477667 finally landed in Firefox 64, which means that discovery and subscription features for RSS / Atom feeds are gone now. This means that if you have a blog or other site that offers a feed but doesn’t explicitly provide a visible link to it, your users probably don’t know it exists. If you care, now might be a good time to add such a link.
It also means that you as a user won’t know about feeds, unless you install an extension. My solution for the moment is to use Livemarks and manually copy feed URLs into NewsBlur once I know they exist. This is suboptimal, but it works for now. (The extension’s main purpose is to restore livemarks functionality, i.e. the thing where you could add a feed as an automatically updated bookmark folder, which can be kind of handy.)
I first got mad about this particular feature deletion, to no avail, back in July. Google’s Chrome, of course, got rid of feed-related features ages ago, and I’ve been mad about that for a while.
If you’re using Chrome, you can get feed subscription features back with this RSS subscription extension.